Connecting with God through poetic articulations of lived, embodied experience–engaging texts from the Revised Common Lectionary for Christian churches, other biblical and spiritual texts, and evocations of the divine in rituals and other public events–always accepting lived reality as a primary source of divine revelation and mystery.

Real Choices

A Reflection in Response to Proper 20, 18th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C (Luke16:1-13)

A cool September morning, walking in the park, my husband talking about work troubles, our dog sniffing the ground and eying the scampering squirrels, birds flitting and singing, we sharing good mornings with those on the same path, admiring other dogs, all the while I keep hearing Jesus, you cannot serve God and wealth, or the way I learned it long ago, God versus Mammon, the god of money, Caesar, evil chasing after wealth, visions of an ugly beast with multiple tentacles reaching out to ensnare us all into putting the pursuit of worldly riches at the center of life.

godmammon.com

Sometimes he just gets in your head and you can’t stop it, sort of like the manager in Jesus’ parable caught up in what he saw as survival, leveraging what was not his to keep him from money or Mammon ruin, forgetting about honor or responsibility— and strangely he seems to come out alright avoiding the axe using other peoples’ money; is this not what we read about with banks too big to fail? Is Jesus recommending cheating those who are owed? Or is he playing us, and his hearers? I don’t claim to know, some scholars I read seem unclear at best, so I can only say the Jesus I know does not dismiss honor, care, love, responsibility, moral judgment so easily. You just have to take my word on that. Or not.

Wall Street, even lobby of my friendly local credit union, feel far away, because I keep hearing Jesus who once again sounds like a socialist, not a fan of free enterprise, or consumersm. Ouch. Most U.S. citizens are not partial to that label, despite The Bern, not ready to see the welfare of the mass more important than the profit of the few who make it work, no prophet of that ancient view accepted even in his hometown or sanctuaries that claim him for their own. Once again Jesus unsettles the easy assumptions of my life and the lives of my comrades in the pews, and so we look away, embarrassed by the demand on our individual and collective soul. Why does he do this again, force us to stand, uncomfortable like school children found wanting, not knowing our lessons and resentful that we cannot go to recess and play as if we have no cares, pretending that no one Is hungry, no one is shivering, no one is dying from neglect?

A walk in the park is a choice for health and happiness; the market says we have choices, and we do, between brands of toothpaste and cars, but Jesus reminds us we have real choices, life and death soul choices.

About this poem . . . . This choice Jesus calls us to make, between focusing on God and focusing on wealth or money or Mammon, is perhaps the most difficult one there is, at least in the United States where the reigning ideology is about getting enough wealth to survive and then to do more, to become wealthy enough to live well and then better and better, until we die and leave it our loved ones who can continue the quest. We are, it seems a “more” culture—everyone wants, we are told by experts, 20% more than they have . . . and that is true if we are at the bottom of the economic pile or the top. Do not our things get in the way of our relationship with God? What are we supposed to do?